Behind the blond-wood bar at Anyway Café, the bartender is whittling a horseradish root, slicing off long pale strips with a little knife. They are bound for one of the large jars of vodka behind her, which are infusing, slowly, with ingredients including black currants, beets, honey, and ginger. These fierce spirits are mixed into the bar’s signature Martinis: Katherine the Great (pomegranate vodka, black-pepper vodka, rosewater), Madam Padam (blueberry vodka, champagne). Best and strangest of all is the borscht Martini—beet vodka and dill vodka, sprinkled with Himalayan pink salt and crushed herbs, a pungent, tangy punch in a frosty glass. It’s easy to down one after another, licking the salt from the rim. In this cavernous subterranean space, the chairs are filled with East Village denizens out for an evening of Russian music and appropriate refreshments; chilled carafes of vodka and plates of pelmeni (Siberian dumplings) are scattered on the tables, consumed dreamily to the sound of an accordion. A tall woman with a long black mane solicits an editorial from a curly-haired writer, and another woman at the table tells a story set at a klezmer-music conference. The man on the accordion, in a duet with a pale-throated young woman in a shawl, sings the Second World War ballad “Tyomnaya Noch’ ” (“Dark Night”) as evening settles in over the neighborhood. “The dark night separates us, my love,” they sing, “and the black, tormented steppe stretches between us.” One table speaks in a jumbled mix of Russian and Ukrainian; when it comes time to make a toast, they say “Bud’mo,” Ukrainian for “Let us be.” ♦